


Pocket

by crucialandinert



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Addiction, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Bisexuality, Codependency, Detox, Dissociation, F/M, Friendship, Heroin, Homelessness, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Character Death, Panromanticism, Protectiveness, Satanism, Sex Work, Straight For You, Suicide, art therapy, crust punk AU, friend sex, i feel like all stories about donald should have those tags, not being as gay as you thought, not feeling worthy of tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-21
Updated: 2017-09-21
Packaged: 2019-01-01 06:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12150606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crucialandinert/pseuds/crucialandinert
Summary: He thinks her real name might have been Jennifer. Or Stephanie—no—Tara. Tara was definitely it. Or maybe he’d never known her real name. It wasn’t important—after all, a name is just a sound somebody makes when they need you. On the night they met, she gave Donald a new name, and that name became realer to him than anything that might have been recorded on his long-gone birth certificate.An AU featuring just aged-out of foster care Donald Dunn's life on the streets, where Tara is a crust punk and Gilfoyle is a cat.All credit for goth teen Jared to @mysteryroach 's awesome fic, Junkyard





	Pocket

**Author's Note:**

> i decided to just write the parts i really wanted to, which did not include "a plot," so, hardcore Aristotelians, consider yourselves forewarned.

He thinks her real name might have been Jennifer. Or Stephanie—no—Tara. Tara was definitely it. Or maybe he’d never known her real name. It wasn’t important—after all, a name is just a sound somebody makes when they need you. He, and everyone else, called her Cookie. Short for Tough Cookie, the name hallowed in history to be bestowed upon the female in the group who don’t need nothing from nobody. On the night they met, Cookie gave Donald a new name, and that name became realer to him than anything that might have been recorded on his long-gone birth certificate.

\---

It hardly mattered where the car dropped him off. He preferred a main thoroughfare if they didn’t mind; less likely to get mugged or gay-bashed. But if they weren’t comfortable with that, then there was nothing that could be done. This time, Donald exited the mid-size sedan on the corner of an industrial block that dipped ominously in and out of lamplight on a shivery night. He cut a starveling figure: absurdly tall, alarmingly skinny; black t-shirt too thin for the weather, bondage pants on the edge of holes; his boots relied on duct tape, and worst of all, his eyeliner was smearing and running down his cheeks. Doing that always did seem to make his nose run, and his eyes surrender tears. Donald crumpled the twenty-dollar bill with a sudden motion, and shoved it in his pocket.

On the bright side, it was better than the alternative, given his fragile posterior. He did the Kegels the group home doctor had prescribed, faithfully before he went to bed, no matter where, or what, “bed” may have meant on any given night. They were preferable to the prayers he’d been made to say over and over, on bloodied knees, at his final house. At least Kegels proclaimed the hope that damage could be healed, instead of the certainty that sin would stain forever.

Donald wiped his eyeliner off on the back of his hand as he walked down the street, feeling like the gawkiest gay goth giraffe to ever be invisible. The next challenge would be finding some place to sleep. He wished, again, that his bedroll hadn’t been stolen at the bus station. Then the faint sound of rowdy laughter approached his ear.

There was a glow from the busted window of an abandoned warehouse. Tentatively, he peeked inside. It seemed to be some kind of squat; a knot of crusties were gathered around a trashcan fire, drinking tallboys and 40s, and the floor was scattered with mattresses and trash. So far, in the short time he’d been on the streets, he’d only received rejection from similar groups of kids; or, if he was unlucky—and Donald, of course, was often unlucky—violence. But the increasing chill and dampness in the air meant he’d have to man up and try again.

Donald approached the group, diffidently. Heads turned to look; tattooed faces smirked; Donald dropped his eyes. A girl stepped forward, a small one, wearing overalls, with a shaved head that subtracted nothing from the lamp-eyed beauty of her face. A sarcastic-looking black cat—can cats be sarcastic?—perched on her shoulder. She walked like a leader. Donald peered down at her, she was more than a foot shorter; yet somehow felt like he was gazing upward, pleadingly.

“Look at you,” she said, “you-” Donald braced himself. What would it be this time? “Poster boy for the gay morticians’ union”? “Frankenstein’s bulimic daughter”? Or just—"faggot."

"Look at you,” the small girl said, “you’re adorable! I wish I could put you in my pocket and take you home with me.” What? Donald thought, and his apologetic shoulders drew in closer as he blushed roses. He felt so small, and embarassed, but wonderful too, as if he were a little boy who might once have been thought of as cute, or even lovable. The crusties around them laughed. Yeah, Pocket, they said, Cookie likes you. And if Cookie likes you, you stay.

\---

From that day they were together nearly all the time. Except when he was out working or she was flying a sign with the cat, whose name was Gilfoyle, and who could stare down a mark like no other. Gilfoyle probably at least doubled her take by sheer force of purr-sonality alone, if Pocket might venture a pun (although he never actually did). As a percentage of the waking day, they weren’t really together that long, it just seemed like the bulk of his life because those were the only hours he felt like he was alive. He barely remembered the other ones, thanks to his long practice with Uncle Jerry’s game. But the time he spent with Cookie, he lived then. Every time he saw her, he felt like he’d just dropped out of the sky. Everything was new, everything started over; in the past, he’d found this lack of continuity frustrating, it made it hard to feel like he was “getting anywhere,” although it wasn’t like he had a destination. Now he found it exhilarating; no longer blank white, but a white-hot glow. 

Everything she said was fascinating. They had long conversations in the hours of twilight, when they’d done well enough that they didn’t have to work for a while. At those times, they’d head up to the mountains above the city and sleep there, away from the group, finding secret glades and meadows on the mountainsides. Pocket hadn’t been exposed to much beauty like that, much of the natural world at all really. One of his placements had been with an Amish family, on a farm; his chiefest memories there were of backbreaking labor. But when the evening-times after work were longer in summer, from the enclosed porch (to put it charitably) where he slept, Pocket could see the sun set across fields dyed gold by dusk, could hear the shiny scritch of crickets silver in his ear, could feel in his heart how the birds swept circles in the cooling sky: murmurating starlings and the dark-eyed junco.

There were many birds in the mountains for him to tell Cookie about; and when she laughed at him for it, he knew it was a laugh of affection, delight, not of mockery. She would talk to him about her satanism, “lower-case s,” she would say. Satanists with theistic tendencies were just as dumb as anyone else who believed they have an all-powerful imaginary friend, in Cookie's opinion. She held that it was weakness; that society is designed to make people weak and then exploit them; satanists just have the balls to defy that conditioning. Her satanism, she said, was a form of self-reliance, a taking of power, a belief in one’s own magic. The Self—that, she informed him, she did capitalize—was the boundary of the world; other people were remote, planets in no orbit, and could never be relied on. No one ever truly acted outside their self-interest, no matter what, she told him; even if they honestly believed they did, they were simply deluded. 

It made Pocket wonder. When he was alone, he didn’t quite feel solid enough to exist; he was diffuse, whisper-thin, a ghost invisible to his own eyes. It was only in response to others that he could see this "Self;" he had learned to perceive his reflection in their demands, their orders, their insults. In every home, he could always rely on them to tell him what he was—nuisance, servant, secret keeper—and what they said, went. Planted, head bowed, in the storm of their anger, Pocket could find calmness, even peace: the relief from uncertainty, the other shoe drop; knowing, concretely, exactly where he stood, and that it felt familiar. Defiance was the last thing that had ever seemed wise; and not only that, he didn’t know what he’d defy them in favor of. If Pocket had desires anymore, they were mostly for things like “sleep” and “warmth” and  “being left alone.”

That was another thing they talked about. Desires. Part of Cookie’s satanism, of course, was a gravely serious commitment to the hedonistic banquet; she was poly and pan and queer and a couple other terms he could never remember, lacking the frame of reference. Pocket was a gay boy of course, others had made that clear to him long before the age when he could have felt any stirrings himself; and at this point, what with all that water under the bridge as it were, he certainly hoped so. However, it was strange to say, the truth was that deep down inside he felt almost maidenly, as though he were still a virgin; at any rate, when it came to getting to choose his partners, he still was. 

As for love, a less untoward topic—albeit one Cookie was much less interested in discussing—Pocket told her had never been in love; just hadn’t met the right guy, he supposed, and it didn’t make it any easier that he much preferred women as friends. While some of the women he’d known were, of course, as bad or worse than the men—putting women on a pedestal is a subtle misogyny of which Pocket would never be guilty—the kindness he’d encountered in his life, that hadn’t come from employees of the state, or extracted some kind of price from him in the end; that kindness had come from the distaff side. The quiet girls in the parade of schools he’d attended, the smart ones who hardly ever spoke, looking out from their own enforced silences, had been able to see what he was hiding. They told him so in a myriad of ways: sliding into a seat at a deserted cafeteria table; lending a sweater and refusing its return; the mysterious appearance of pudding cups. The playground volunteers, the older ladies, had their ways too of including a child who sat at the edge of the yard, curled into himself, playing with no one and nothing. Would you like to help me untangle these jump ropes, Donald? they’d say, and jiminy cricket he sure as heck would. 

Later, on the bench, where they would rest if it was clear of miscreants on times-out from their sports, Pocket enacted secret games of how close to the ladies he could reasonably sit, how close he could get to their radiant warmth and their sweater-muffled air of age and lavender; and sometimes, if they let him accompany them in the walk back to the classroom after the yard was clear of the others, and he’d been at the school for a long enough time, and was for some reason feeling heart-flutteringly bold—Pocket would make the shyest, tiniest move to infiltrate his hand in theirs, just brushing his fingers somewhere near their wrists, to see if they would reach for him. And if they did, for as long as they’d let him keep it there, his entire being would rush down his arm and mass into that hand, pressing against its plane of contact with the other's flesh, trying to engulf, and catalogue, and hold in memory every crumb of sensation; their soft dry palms felt like the world. 

When Pocket turned again outward, away from the memory and back to himself, he was surprised to discover a tiny warm hand inside his big ungainly one, and that he was looking up into lamping dark eyes that were lit with tears.

\--

So that’s why Pocket didn’t feel like it made him any less gay when he and Cookie began sleeping together. As friends. For instance, it’s perfectly normal to express your feelings to your friend by daring to kiss her on the top of her bald, prickly head while she’s arranged across your bony lap, folded into your absurdly long arms. Plenty of friends giggle, and squeeze each other tight, and give each other smacks on the cheek, like little babies. And it’s well known that, after a startling and sudden soul gaze during which the lostness and aloneness you both feel passes like an ocean between your island eyes, that there are some things you can only express to your friend with feather-light kisses on soft lips. Friends are likely, then, to begin to breathe as one, joining their mouths in a way that crosses universes. And, then, many friends, though they’re not sure how, are melting into each other, becoming part of each other’s bodies, and one will find himself trying to touch the other with every square inch of his far-flung skin, creating some geographical and logistical problems that cause her to say, “what the fuck are you trying to do, Pocket?” and laugh. And afterward, as one friend holds the other while she sleeps, her tiny dovelike body completely contained in the raw-boned cage of his own, watched over by a resentful-looking cat, although that’s silly, cats can’t be resentful, and can’t murder you, especially not with their eyes—it’s perfectly usual for a gay boy to feel that in his beautiful, strong, protective friend, he has finally found his home.

\--

It happened a couple of days after Gilfoyle “fucked off with a casual” in Cookie’s words: some Indian kid who seemed to have been hanging around the group trying to work up the nerve to buy drugs. He’d kept to the outskirts of the circle as the travelers lazed and bullshitted and played ukulele on the grass at the park; the fake gold chain he wore, in what even Pocket judged to be a somewhat strained attempt to look cool, instantly earned him the ball-busting sobriquet “Mr. T.” Gilfoyle seemed to have taken a shine to him though, uncharacteristically permitting himself to be stroked and talked at; Pocket could sympathize with the Indian boy’s focus on the animal, so typical of someone too awkward to talk to the available humans. He didn’t think much of it when he and Cookie went across the street to the bodega, to pick up another beer for Cookie and, at her behest, to explore the possibility of an Arizona Iced Tea for him (not this time, but he was getting more open to it). It was the last thing either of them could have expected, that they’d get back to find the Indian kid and Gilfoyle gone. Anger rose in Pocket’s throat as he told Cookie he would track down and deal with the foul catnapper himself if she were but to say the word; however, she scoffed and said that Gilfoyle did as he willed—cats being the original satanists—and if he’d left with anyone, it had been by choice, as he could never be taken by force. But as she turned to leave the park, and he carefully laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, she shrugged it away with a jerk.

That night they slept in one of their secret spots, away from the city, under the stars. Pocket, as usual, declined a hit off her freshly-packed bowl with a polite, “no thank you.”

Cookie stretched out, her body relaxed, then curled back up, sleeping bag securely swirled around her, garrisoned against the night air. Pocket’s hands slipped out from under his too-short army blanket, tucking themselves, palms-up, underneath her—something he’d taken to doing through the nights when they slept side-by-side instead of tangled together. Keeping in some form of contact seemed to limit his nightmares, and the foreign speaking of his sleep.

But Cookie didn’t understand how he could be so goddamn sober all the time. It had to be he didn’t know what he was missing. She told him she loved how getting fucked up made the world small. Like right at that moment. There was nothing but Pocket's face, and warmth; the sky was a rabbit’s hole, a snug crevice, a blanket over flashlights, dark, and close. I don’t love the stars, she said, they are nothing but ellipses, trailing off in billions of miles of emptiness; reaching from right here—she bonelessly thumped her hand to her chest—to infinity. Fuck that. There’s nothing beautiful about things that are empty. 

But when I'm fucked up I feel... full, all through me. Why are you always sober, Pocket?

The glow from a couple of Yankee candles, boosted earlier that day from a nearby Walgreens, flickered over Pocket’s grave, earnest, oddly-made face. His gaze turned inwards; his hands crept out from under Cookie’s warm body to insert themselves, folded, between the stony ground and his head. The answer, he told her, was: because he never wanted to be like them. Like people he’d known who—weren’t always sober. He went quiet for a long moment. The trajectory of candlelight skimmed the surface of his eyes along just the right plane to flash them a paler-than-usual blue, more clouds than sky; like blind eyes, like newly-born eyes.

The answer came slowly; disembarking from a baffled tongue, his words limped away from him jaggedly toward her. “I realized, a long time ago, that if you’ve in some way been hurt—I mean really hurt, the kind that you carry with you, forever—that damage will either make you hurt others—many, many people do, and it’s not their fault, it’s not their fault, at all—or... you can choose... to be the one that gets hurt.” He stopped again, to breathe, eyes directed at hers, but with a kind of hard and blank intensity, unseeing, blue as plates. “I chose… I just never want to hurt anyone. Ever.”

What about neither? What about choosing neither?

His gaze seemed to tiptoe back from wherever it had gone. He looked at her wonderingly, like one of them had just fallen from the sky.

It didn't occur to me, he said.

\--

He hadn’t known there was such a thing as a functional heroin addict. Though if there was, of course she would be one, because she was so smart, not like the rest of them. He couldn’t believe how long it’d taken him to find out. It must have been in the lost hours they had to spend away from each other that she hid it; but in their wilderness, when she stayed a little too long in the campground bathroom, he found himself kicking down a stall door to see something he really didn’t want to see. And when she showed him the marks dotting the delicate veins around the heel of her hand, under the leather cuff he’d never questioned – why had he never questioned? he should have fucking questioned – where she’d been chipping carefully, moderately, with all the proper harm reduction techniques; a tremendous cave of self-directed rage tore open inside him, because he had not known. Her face hardened a bit at the look of shock on his, and she explained that her satanist beliefs were diametrically opposed to any kind of “moralizing” about this, and it would not be tolerated, that she did as she willed and the choice was his to like it, or be left. That would have shut his mouth, had he dared to be thinking about saying a word, which he hadn’t. So Pocket’s tears obediently withheld their flow until later when she was asleep, when the wild rage again rose and he punched himself, over and over, in his weak, sunken sternum, because he was so angry at the heart locked below.

The anger, however, was an indulgence; that he could and had to swallow, pushed down to the bottom of himself until it appeared dark and warbled, as through geological ages of glass. What was sparkling clear, what pushed him to the edges of his eyes, always wide now and staring, what threatened to pull his ribcage out through his skin and sent a cloud of static through his brain: that was the fear. He could never breathe. His words dwindled to nothing. Everything in him was tensed, drawn taught, and straining toward her, as though if he were only able to keep looking at her, all the time, she would continue to exist. He was terrified that she would die. And if she died, as Pocket knew he had no power whatsoever to prevent, he was terrified it would be alone.

But it only took Cookie a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks of waking up to find herself propped on her side in a nest of backpacks and bedrolls, so she could not choke on her own vomit in her sleep; a watchful Pocket sitting crosslegged a few feet away, hollow eyes ever hollower. And then eventually, waking up in his lap, still carefully arranged on her side, atop the blankets he knew were required to make his knobby knees habitable; his torso propped up against some surface for when he inevitably lost the challenge issued by sleep: head thrown-back, dark hair tugged to the side, childishly, that fragile windpipe, disquieting, exposed; and the platters of his turned-up palms always, always tucked beneath her, like he was trying to hand her to the wakeful stars for their protection.

“Pocket,” she said quite casually one morning, “I’ve been thinking about quitting.” His mouth opened; there wasn’t any stopping the rush of tears that time, and he soon found his fist inside it. Could it be? Could she have seen him, the fear he felt, but more, the oceanic, chest-cracking tenderness that was desperate to break through him to engulf her? That she would do this, that maybe… he was in some way enough, that perhaps she’d let him try to be that thing she needed, that thing that filled the emptiness in her. No, no, erase that thought, Pocket, you are terrible, you are prideful, you are wrong.

When he recovered his breath it was to whisper, “I would never have asked you that. You know I wouldn’t.”

“I do know. That’s why,” she said.

\---

Pocket thought of nothing else for a week; he was suffused with antic energy. Cookie saw him in snapshots: his solemn face reflected in a library computer, pencil resting on his lips, as he read site after site on "heroin withdrawal home remedies" and took copious notes. Debating between Jello and applesauce, Gatorade and Pedialyte, inconspicuous as a cell-phone tower in the aisles at Ralphs, as peevish ladies shoved their carts around him. Smiling as he showed her the basket of fancy bath salts and bombs and lotions and things he somehow thought she'd be able to use. Cookie tried not to see: the weariness, the suffering, the shame that was buried in his eyes as he paid, in cash, twenty dollar bill after twenty dollar bill, the money he'd earned so they could spend the week in a motel. Cookie didn't feel guilty, there was no reason to feel guilty. Pocket, like anyone else, was only acting in his own self-interest, after all. Somehow.

When, the typical eight hours after her last shot, the dopesickness began to kick in, Pocket, for all his research, was shocked. It was nothing like the meth comedowns he'd seen. There was a lot of himself that needed to go away, and stay away, over those five days. He found himself thinking about Florence Nightengale, the famous British nurse, flitting like a battlefield angel among the fallen soldiers, a lantern in her hand and a pet owl named Athena in her pocket. Florence had been one of the imaginary friends, like Harriet Tubman, he'd learned about in the little book of "Women Who Changed The World" he'd had for awhile, before it was taken away. But it hadn't mattered. The book was engraved on his heart, and the strength he could call upon from his friends there was his to keep as well.

Again, it was a blessing that Pocket could not remember much about the actual time when she was detoxing. Instead, his clearest memory was of the moment he awoke—to his shame, that he had slept—to find her, clear-eyed, in his arms. His hand flew to her face, testing, checking, Cookie kissed him, lightly, on the mouth. Pocket kissed her back, he let his eyelids fall, drew breath, a gasp, then permitted himself to drink deeply of the warm dark of her. There was only this being in all the world, this soft sky he had floated into; the one he could turn to without harm, the one he could trust. Healthy, and alive. Again, he was born.

When morning came—their first morning in days, with sunlight re-invited to the room and everything—she asked him to go with her to New Mexico. She wanted to make her yearly visit home, which was always the same: tolerate her stepfather for as long as she could stand while ducking her mother's questions and gathering money, calories, and material objects for the year ahead. You'll like New Mexico, Cookie told him, it's warm there, not like here, and there's a shit-ton of birds near where mom and Roy live. My mom'll feed you; you can sleep on our couch. If Roy tries to give you any shit—well he better not try.

Pocket, are you crying? Don't do that. Don't cry.

\--

1\. The Greyhound's an unfine and unprivate place, but some, they found, do there embrace.  
2\. The best way to fit Pocket's legs in a standard U.S. bus seat is to turn him sideways and let him put them across your lap. Even then they still stick out into the aisle.  
3\. Cookie is amazing at "the shoe game," where you extrapolate a person's entire life story based on their footwear. Although, one would not have surmised there were quite so many spies, Navy SEALS, adulterous astronauts, and defrocked priests on the same fairly out-of-the-way route.  
4\. The number of consecutive meals for which you can eat a Tobasco Slim Jim without consequences is 3.  
5\. The number of consecutive meals for which you can eat a gas station hot dog without consequences is 0.  
6\. People really, really don't care what they are saying on their phones in public in front of everyone.  
7\. A reliance on the thrift stores of rural Idaho for your paperback reading material is going to lead to a lot of disappointment unless you read them out loud in funny voices.  
8\. Reading paperbacks aloud in funny voices is going to lead to popularity among the kids on the bus, unpopularity among the childless adults, and then popularity among the parents again which can work out in the end if the parents are bigger.  
9\. At some point the driver is going to find and confiscate the kitten.  
10\. Your happiness can only last as far as Arizona.

\--

He saw it in snapshots. Another rest stop. Cookie chatting, with an unsavory fellow Pocket didn't like the looks of. Another long wait. The lighted bus, pulling away into the night. Another stall door to be kicked down. Another sight he didn't want to see. Then: a payphone. Cold tile. Her lips, cold. Her tiny, dovelike body, now heavy, ebbing breath; underneath her, contorted to reach, Pocket's upturned palms: trying once more to offer her to heaven, knowing all the while that no protection comes from there.

\---

He knew how ODs work, of course. Nine times out of ten, it's when someone who's been clean for a while takes a shot the size they'd been used to previously, but their tolerance has dropped. He also knew, that Cookie had only quit because of his weakness, and his fear. That he had, in essence—no, no weasel words, Donald -- that he had killed her. It was only true. No matter what went white, no matter what disappeared or what he could drown in the sea of his mind, that would always be with him. He could see his "Self" now, he needed no other eyes, and that was the rotted core of it.

Because he stayed with the corpse and didn't leave, like any smarter, more self-preserving street kid would have done; he was taken in by the police. But he was clean, not even any paraphernalia, and seemed more sinned against than sinning; and when he said he'd aged out of foster care and had nowhere to go, they had a number to call to an organization that existed to help with that. He could have somewhere to live, get training for a job, maybe even apply to college, they said at the station. If that was what the new people wanted from him, Donald would, as usual, obey; lifeless, gone limp. He felt muffled, hollow, a dull ache; a grief so large, it became the universe, drawn away from distant stars: a void where he would be entombed alone, forever. 

When a lovely white-haired lady named Muriel arrived to pick him up, he quietly extinguished the urge to grasp for her hand. "Come on Donald," she said, "let's take you home."

**Author's Note:**

> this fic, such as it is, is dedicated to a sweet, brilliant, funny friend who lost his life that way.  
> it also is about the suicide of a beloved friend and feeling responsible for her death. 
> 
> she happened to be the friend who OD'd's ex-girlfriend. it happened years later but i very much feel it was related. this kind of self-dealt death, whether purposeful or accidental, has been repeatedly shown in studies to be contagious. it damages the survivors in a way they may not heal from. if you can possibly hold on, or there is an action you are reluctant to take that has any chance of helping, try to use that fact to drive you; to counter what your mind will invariably make you believe: that those of us who love you would be better off if you were gone. it's a murderous lie.
> 
> other art therapy: i got to describe my experience of identity diffusion, dissociation, and other BPD things some of which don't even begin with the letter D.


End file.
